Woody Allen’s Missed Opportunity in “Midnight in Paris”

I saw MIDNIGHT IN PARIS again last night, which tells you how much I like it. But there is one missed opportunity — one example of wrong casting — that I want to tell you about and that I didn’t get a chance to get into in my review.

Everybody wants to be in a Woody Allen movie, because everyone wants to be FOREVER, and Woody Allen’s movies, at least from this vantage point, look like they’re going to stand the test of time. Knowing this, Allen himself sometimes can’t resist vanity casting — that is, casting people that are hard to get, not because they’re ideal for the role, but because the IDEA of having them is so appealing.

Such is the case of the casting of Carla Bruni in MIDNIGHT IN PARIS. Bruni disappears on screen. She plays a tour guide and doesn’t particularly look good, doesn’t look like a tour guide, and every time she is called upon to say something, she looks like she wants to hide. She lacks the authority to be on screen. She lacks the authority to be a tour guide.

Now if you see the movie, you’ll probably say, yeah, but so what? She is only in three brief scenes, and those scenes aren’t particularly important. But in fact, the reason they don’t seem important — particularly the last of the three — is because the actress bring NOTHING TO THEM, besides a certain understandable terror at being in a Woody Allen movie. They seem “so what” because there’s a “so what” actress acting in them.

In her first scene, she is conducting a tour, and an obnoxious American starts correcting her (he’s wrong by the way). She looks numb and confused, that’s all. Then in her last scene, Owen Wilson finds the unpublished diary of the woman he loves. He finds the diary in 2010, but he is in love its author (this is a time travel movie) in the 1920s. And he gets the tour guide (Bruni) to translate the diary into English, as they sit on a park bench. Bruni plays it like she has no idea what the importance is of what she’s reading — a supportable choice, but not at all interesting.

We don’t look at her. We only look at Owen Wilson.

Any number of actresses — actually just about ANY actress — would have done better. But the IDEAL actress to do this brief role was none other than Bruni’s older sister, Valeria Bruni Tedeschi, who is a great actress both in France and Italy and very famous. Before Carla married Sarkozy, Valeria was the more known of the two, by far.

There are no good clips of Tedeschi on youtube that have English subtitles, but you don’t need subtitles for the above clip, from 1994 (Tedeschi looks the same now as then.) It gives you a sense of her emotional volatility and presence.

Had Tedeschi played the tour guide role, she would have walked onto the set with a whole secret history. She is a tour guide because . . . take your pick . . . her husband left her and she needs the money . . Or she is an artist starving to death somewhere . . . So when the obnoxious American corrected her, you would have seen a whole world of complexity in her response. I can see her doing it — smiling with discomfort but feeling hostile inside.

Likewise in the scene in which she reads the diary, she would have connected with the words and understood the emotion, across time. She would have been part of the emotional life of the city, which this guy is responding to. She would have understood what these words mean to the guy, even without knowing the details. The scene would have been as brief as it is now, but it would have landed with force and depth. It would have been more than a plot point.

I was particularly thinking of Tedeschi because, when I interviewed her in 2009, she told me that for years she studied English at the Berlitz school, because she had a dream all her life “to work with Woody Allen.” She laughed, “And now he asked my sister, so it’s finished.”

He asked the wrong sister.

By the way, here is Tedeschi 13 years later, in a two-shot, not unlike the one Allen uses in the third scene in MIDNIGHT IN PARIS. It might give you a good idea of how it might have looked with her in the scene. It’s from ACTRICES, which Tedeschi directed and co-wrote.